Oakville Zen Meditation
Awakening: What is it ?
Awakening is a shift of consciousness from ongoing thinking to pure, genuine non analytic awareness of the current moment and its contents.
It takes over our constant, mostly fictional daydreaming world made of thoughts, feelings, and illusions in which we are trapped and lost, and what Zen calls:
“Day sleepwalking” or “Thinking zombie ”.
Pure Awareness exists already in all living beings mostly in its subconscious form, but, as we grow up, it has been totally neutralized by our continuous cognitive thinking. Babies and toddlers practice active awareness all the time w/o knowing it because thinking is not yet their dominant default mode.
Please note that Zen Awareness's meaning is different from its synonymous mundane word “being awake” meaning : “I know” .
What Awakening-based awareness does?
We experience in a mindful way the concrete realities of the present moment and content such as:
> Where your body is, what it is doing and perceiving through sensorial receptors.
> What your surroundings are made of using our 5 sensorial inputs.
> That your mind is a great deceptive friend generating a long list of illusions such as:
Thoughts/feelings' contents are real / factual:not so, they are mostly fictional.
Past and future contents are real /factual: not so, they are fictional.
I have time for ….
Things/ Events, People last: everything is absolutely transient.
Everything can be controlled. We do not even control our own mind.
Living beings are a permanent, unique, independent and separate self-entity. NO
Past, present, and future exist. Only the present moment exist. Past and future are
in memories, and calendar, but their content id virtual.
Life, people, events and surroundings are what they are and not what we think
or want them to be.
What are the consequences of Awakening?
Our ego-driven autonomous, daydreaming mostly fictional thinking that takes possession of us and runs our life 24/7 becomes under control.!
Achieving serenity is underway.
The 3 common misunderstandings about Awakening:
Is it bliss? Awakening is not a divine, mystical, supernatural, and miraculous state in which permanent bliss is achieved. On the contrary, Awakening is 100% down to earth, in the present moment, and only uses the mind as an analytic and decisional tool.
Is it intellectual? You cannot make Awakening happen by reading 100 books and listening to 200 podcasts.Instead of awakening, you just add the concept of awakening to your mind, or the mental image of what an awakened or enlightened person is like, and then try to live up to that image.
Is it thinking about thinking? Thinking of thoughts is not part of Awakening; it is just thinking of thinking. The first glimpse of Awakening appears only when consciousness is free from analytic thinking.
The good news:
Again, Awakening-based awareness is already present in all of us as our default mode at birth. However, very soon , and as we are aging, the thinking mode including illusions and delusions becomes dominant.
How to achieve Awakening?
You don’t have to achieve it since the practice of mindfulness meditation is practicing Awakening: differentiating factual reality from the virtual one.
